3 million smart toothbrushes were not used in a DDoS attack after all, but it could happen (2024)

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3 million smart toothbrushes were not used in a DDoS attack after all, but it could happen? ›

A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack.

Hackers didn't hack your smart toothbrush. What's happening: Swiss outlet Aargauer Zeitung published a story last week claiming that hackers had launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against roughly 3 million internet-connected toothbrushes, causing damage to the tune of millions of euros.

Update 2 — 2/9/2024 6:30am PT: The security company at the nexus of the original report that three million toothbrushes were used in a DDOS attack has now retracted the story and claimed it was a result of a mistranslation — but according to the news outlet that published the initial report, that statement isn't true.

That's fiction. Last week, a Swiss-German news site published a story that three million smart toothbrushes had been hacked to conduct attacks against a company. But that wasn't the case. It was actually a hypothetical scenario, although cyber security experts say it is possible.

DDoS attacks can have many other motivations including political, hacktivist, terrorist, and business competition. Anyone with a financial or ideological motive can damage an organization by launching a DDoS attack against it.

The Largest Reported HTTP DDoS attack, 2023

In February 2023, Cloudflare reported identifying and successfully mitigating the most colossal DDoS attack to date. This attack registered a staggering 71 million requests per second, surpassing the previous record of 46 million RPS set in June 2022 by over 54%.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a DoS attack that uses multiple computers or machines to flood a targeted resource. Both types of attacks overload a server or web application with the goal of interrupting services.

The cumulative effect of DDoS attacks makes them substantially more destructive to web servers. DDoS attacks are severely detrimental to an online business because they completely stop the flow of traffic or slow a website down to the point of it being unusable.

Denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are malicious attempts to disrupt the normal operations of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of Internet traffic.

DDoS attacks are usually only likely to affect business owners – particularly people in charge of large computer networks. However, they can also affect small businesses, blogs or personal websites. They might also bring down services that you depend on, like banking or email servers.

How are 3 million hacked toothbrushes? ›

So as it turns out, 3 million smart toothbrushes were not hacked, and everything you read on the internet is, in fact, not true! But … it certainly could happen, so make sure you are protecting any smart devices you have, and keep in mind that everything you own doesn't have to be smart.

Stefan Zuger from Fortinet advises protecting devices against malware and suspicious activity to stay safe from cybercriminals. Hackers have reportedly used millions of toothbrushes to launch a DDoS attack.

Cybercriminals rarely choose their victims at random. The first stage of the cyber kill chain is reconnaissance, where an attacker narrows down a list of targets based on organization profile, security posture, and vulnerable individuals.

Certain industries, such as gaming, ecommerce, and telecommunications, are targeted more than others. DDoS attacks are some of the most common cyberthreats, and they can potentially compromise your business, online security, sales, and reputation.

The collective power of this compromised network of devices makes it challenging to defend against because it can overwhelm even the most robust network infrastructure and security measures. Not only does a DDoS attack increase the attack power, it also makes it harder to identify the true source of the attack.

During an attack, no employees are able to access network resources, and in the case of Web servers running eCommerce sites, no consumers will be able to purchase products or receive assistance. The dollar figure varies, but companies can lose $20,000 per hour in the event of a successful attack.

A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack.

One of the largest verifiable DDoS attacks on record targeted GitHub, a popular online code management service used by millions of developers. This attack reached 1.3 Tbps, sending packets at a rate of 126.9 million per second. The GitHub attack was a memcached DDoS attack, so there were no botnets involved.

CIA Triad and DDoS Attack

In cybersecurity, we think of the CIA triad in terms of types of attacks: Confidentiality: Is my information secret? Integrity: Is my information accurate and trustworthy? Availability: Can I get my information when and where I need it?

A Brief History of DDoS Attacks

The first known distributed denial of service attack occurred in 1996 when Panix, now one of the oldest internet service providers, was knocked offline for several days by a SYN flood, a technique that has become a classic DDoS attack.